Peer review is like a box of chocolates.

In talking with Gary Lackmann recently about my philosophy of peer review, the issue came up about how much you can push authors to submit to your will as Editor. I thought about what G. K. Batchelor said in his article in Journal of Fluid Mechanics “Preoccupations of a journal editor” that you don’t have […]

How to Prepare a Really Lousy Submission: Water Resources Research Editorial Team

Sent to me from colleagues at the University of Utah. [PDF]

How NOT to review a paper. The tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer

A paper by Graham Cormode (2009) [PDF], sent to me by Rene Garreaud. The abstract gives you a flavor of how this paper reads…. There are several useful guides available for how to review a paper in Computer Science. These are soberly presented, carefully reasoned and sensibly argued. As a result, they are not much […]

Thoughts about Clarke’s “Ethics of Science Communication on the Web”

My friend Jim reminded me about an article “Ethics of Science Communication on the Web” by Maxine Clarke of the Nature Publishing Group in Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics. I might have seen this paper before, but Jim’s reminder and me taking a look at it again strikes me as a little ironic. Don’t […]

The importance of proper citation

Just recently I discovered a published article that neglected to cite the whole field of the topic that they were investigating. The article did have citations to the statistical methods and other papers that were related to their work, but not a single paper had been cited that had performed the same statistical analyses that […]

A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform

An interesting article from the New York Times about the sharp rise in retractions of published articles. Another blog post about the rise in the number of retractions and the responsible (irresponsible?) journals.

Rejected for publication: What now?

So, your manuscript was rejected? Before you start firebombing the editor’s place of work and writing screeds on your blog, consider the following. Put yourself in the reviewer’s shoes. It may be hard to do so, but it is often the best way to understand what the reviewer is trying to communicate. If the reviewer […]

A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper

Paul Roebber sent me this hilarious letter written by a frustrated author to the Editor. Enjoy! Glass, R. L., 2000: A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper. The Journal of Systems and Software, 54, 1. [PDF] Image from http://lightsallaround.wordpress.com/author/jackieleasommers/

The decreasing number of studies with negative results

When I lived in Oklahoma, Chuck Doswell used to lament to me that it was difficult to publish null cases in meteorology (for example, when something was forecast to happen, but didn’t). Later, when talking to Roseanne McNamee at the University of Manchester, she lamented the same. There are even several journals for negative results: […]

Scientists Behaving Badly

Fabrication of data, plagiarism, theft, retraction, image duplication, destruction of property, and death. These are the results from the Top Science Scandals of 2011, as determined by The Scientist magazine. (Thanks to Dave Topping for pointing this out.)

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